Laura Dent

Laura Dent lives near Durham. She is 17 and in her second year of college studying for A Levels in English Language, Media Studies and Citizenship. Laura started working on children’s issues through her local youth council - Durham Children and Young People’s Council, working on the issues of sex education, children’s rights, improving relationships between the police and young people, as well as school councils. She is also involved in Connexions at a local level - on the Youth Forum and involved in selection and recruitment of staff. On a national level Laura is involved with the Children’s Rights Alliance for England, working on child poverty, corporal punishment and the case for a Children’s Rights Commissioner in England, with “Right Here Right Now”. Laura believes strongly in children’s rights and feels that all children and young people should be listened to and have adequate protection from the government.

David Hinchliffe MP

David Hinchliffe is Labour MP for Wakefield and chair of the Health Select Committee. David entered the Commons in 1987, after a career in social work and experience of local government in Leeds and Wakefield. Before 1997, he was an opposition frontbench spokesman on health for three years. David is a long-term supporter of the campaign for law reform to end all corporal punishment and has frequently raised the issue in the House as well as in the media. He was actively involved in the campaign to end all school beating and was probably the first MP to seek to have the “reasonable chastisement” defence removed altogether in 1989, when he moved an amendment to the Bill which became the Children Act 1989.

Penelope Leach

Penelope Leach is a research psychologist specialising in child development, and a passionate advocate for children and parents. She is president of the National Child Minding Association; a trustee of Home-Start; a former trustee and current research adviser to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, a founding committee member of the UK branch of the World Association for Infant Mental Health
- and a mother and grandmother. Her longstanding commitment to principled change to give children equal protection under the law on assault has hardened with successive statements from the Committee on the Rights of the Child; with evidence from Sweden of long-term benefits of a ban on physical punishment and with the public support given to comparable legal reforms in a growing number of other countries.

Claire Rayner

Claire is well known as for many years a leading “Agony Aunt” and adviser and medical correspondent for many popular magazines, as well as writing articles for professional journals. She is President of the Patients’ Association. She originally trained as a nurse and went on to study midwifery. Claire is the author of over ninety books, including a broad range of medical subjects from sex education for children and adults through to
home nursing, family health and baby and child care, as well as a great deal of very successful fiction. She has launched many campaigns – for patients, elderly people and children. Claire has been an active and outspoken supporter of the campaign for law reform to end all corporal punishment of children for many years.

Sir William Utting

Sir William began his career as a Probation Officer in County Durham. From 1970 to 1976 he was Director of Social Services for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. In 1976 he became Chief Social Work Officer at the Department of Health and Social Security and retired from the service in 1991 as Chief Inspector of Social Services at the Department of Health. Throughout this time he was chief professional adviser on social services and social work to the Secretary of State. He has been President of the National Institute for Social Work since 1997 and President of the Mental Health Foundation since 1999. Sir William became Deputy Chair of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 2001. He was knighted in 1991. Sir William chaired the Gulbenkian Foundation’s Commission on Children and Violence, whose 1995 report recommended abolition of all corporal punishment.

Baroness Walmsley

Joan Walmsley is a former teacher and PR consultant who entered the House of Lords in May 2000. She has served for two years as the Liberal Democrat Deputy Education Spokesman with responsibility for the Early Years but has recently been appointed as Deputy Home Affairs Spokesman. She is a keen supporter of CAU!, an NSPCC Parliamentary Ambassador and a member of the Executive Committee of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Children. She has often spoken on child protection issues in the House and on the media, regularly questioning the Government’s decision not to amend the law on physical punishment of children and is passionate about playing a part in making that change happen.